The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Network devices such as bridges and routers may be implemented by arranging packet processing units in a pipeline architecture. For example, a network device may include a policy unit, a router unit, a policer unit, a bridging unit, etc., implemented as units in a pipeline. The pipeline architecture generally reduces packet transmission delays in network devices that are required to handle packets at a very fast rate.
Each packet processing unit in the pipeline generally increases the latency in the end-to-end processing time of a packet. Some types of communications, such as communications relating to certain financial applications (e.g., sending requests to buy or sell securities), for example, may demand that these transmission latencies be very small. Even small latencies in packet transmissions (e.g., on the order of nanoseconds or milliseconds) can adversely affect a desired outcome, such as buying or selling a security at a target price.